I am sure at this point you must be all thinking “why were the forums down for so long?” The thing is, for one reason or another, for the past 9 years there’s only been one person in charge of the forums’ technical platform. And between Wesnoth and other stuff and real life, that person hasn’t had time to fully dedicate herself to the forums in a while. What has been accomplished here today is the culmination of several years of not having time to work on upgrades and improvements because of (arguably more important) things constantly getting in the way. It’s long overdue, but I believe it’s worth the wait, for the reasons outlined below.

This wasn’t a trivial upgrade and a number of unexpected situations cropped up despite my best effort to test things days, weeks and even months in advance. It turns out that Wesnoth.org is a bit trickier to appease than I thought. Nonetheless, your posts and data should all be safe and intact and ready for you to carry on with your usual Wesnoth-related activities.

That said, if you do spot anything unusual or broken, make sure to report it here as soon as you can.

Without further ado, here are the changes in this new forum version:

General changes:

All user styles now adapt to your screen resolution/size/orientation. Have fun browsing these forums on your mobile device of choice!

The new Team page linked at the bottom now displays the following staff user groups: Forum Administrators, Forum Moderators, Multiplayer Moderators, Wiki Administrators, Site Administrators.

Quoting a post using the Quote button now includes a link to the original.

The new Notifications system allows you to receive alerts to events that concern you, configurable in your User Control Panel, without having to use your email. You can be notified when people quote you, reply to a topic to which you have subscribed, a topic which you have bookmarked using the forums’ bookmarking functionality, etc.

It is now possible to switch between displaying user profiles on the left side of viewtopic (our default) or on the right side (the upstream default) using the options menu in viewtopic.

AcidTech Orange has been removed and replaced with AcidTech (the original blue variant).

prosilver Vanilla has been removed. Or maybe not. Users using it are now using prosilver (which is actually the same thing), while the rest of the world uses prosilver Special Edition. If this seems confusing to you, just rest assured that your style preferences are the same as before (except for the bit I mentioned above).

The following media file extensions are now allowed as attachments in posts and PMs: .3g2, .3gp, .m4a, .m4v, .mov, .mp3, .mp4, .mpeg, .mpg, .ogg, .ogm, .qt, .ram, .rm, .wma, .wmv (The file size limit for all of them is 8 MiB.)

Rumour has it that you can now use emojis if you have a device/browser that enables you to use them. Yes, I realize it sounds a bit weird when you put it like that.

The Quick Reply editor has significantly less features than before, as they were provided by a mod that’s been abandoned since. This may be addressed at a later time.

BBCode changes:

The [dfn] BBCode has been removed due to its redundancy and obsolete markup.

All BBCode templates have been rewritten for the new text parser. This may or may not break some unusual use cases. Make sure to report anything that seems unusual in this regard.

A new [media] BBCode is available for embedding content from Bandcamp, Gist, Imgur, Pastebin, SoundCloud, Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube. This is mostly a fun experiment and I’m curious what people plan to do with this new power that I can just as easily take away from them with a couple of clicks. (And no, it can’t be used in user signatures, no matter how hard you try. No, don’t give me that look, I knew you were already working on linking to Rick Astley’s iconic production in your signature.)

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And that’s really about it. Thanks for your patience.
Have fun and remember to report any bugs!

I deployed a patch a few hours ago to address an issue with attachments other than the first one disappearing when previewing posts or edits to posts (as opposed to submitting them without previewing). If you posted anything including more than one attachment since the maintenance was completed, you might want to check your posts to ensure all your attachments are there. Apologies for the inconvenience!